Heath Scare and a Computer Upgrade

Posted by icemonkey9 on Aug 23, 2010 in computer | 3 comments

Yes, those two things in the headline for this blog entry are mutually exclusive.

Heath

I had developed an issue that I didn't think was a big deal and ended up getting so bad I went to Urgent Care on Friday morning.  I spent 2.5 hours there getting tested and the news sucked.  I don't want to get into it but I am fine, what I had was totally treatable, and thanks to the meds is now gone (Monday).  I found out it's both dietary and hereditary so with the proper diet and exercise I'll be just fine.  The bad news, outside of the discomfort I was in, was that I had to stay home per the doctor's orders.  What that meant was that a trip to Pala Casino and Deepstacks Live was cancelled, along with my chance to interview and hang out with Mike "The Mouth" Matusow and BoostedJ, two guys I've wanted to meet.  But, I am glad I got myself sorted out obviously, and there will be other times to meet those two down the road.

Computer Upgrade

My computer had been wigging out on me for the last two weeks include a scare last week when StarCraft 2 inexplicably crashed, my computer shut down and then would die in the middle of booting to Windows.  It took over an hour to get it working again.  I kept an eye on the system after that and this entire week it was lagging and then during poker sessions (the last straw I tell you!!) the entire computer would freeze for 60 seconds ... and I'd time out on every hand and table.  UGH.

So - I upgraded on Sunday since I was feeling so much better.  Here's what I got:

This is the Intel i7 930 Quad-Core processor that runs at 2.8GHz and can overclock itself to beyond.  It's an amazing processor!

This is the Asus P6T X58 Motherboard, which can do some overclocking but I do not plan to go down that road for a while. This thing screams as it is, but this Mobo will let me have 24GB of RAM if I wanted! Great looking board and worked right away, so kudos to ASUS for another fine product.

Here we have the Corsair Patriot 6GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM kit.  Because I installed Windows 7 64-bit edition, I have more than 3GB of maximum RAM now which is awesome since I run 23 programs at once typically and do stuff like Camtasia or gaming which can be RAM intensive.

This puppy is the 128MB Corsair Nova Solid State Hard Drive.  I got this to be my primary hard drive to put my Operating System and basic software on (meaning Adobe Suite, MS Office, and of course HEM and PostgreSQL).  This is one of the fastest SSDs on the market for read/write, which is why I went with this one which was $50 more than the Kingston version of the same size but was significantly slower.

The result was that my computer boots up in like ... oh ... 5 seconds.  No joke.  Things like FireFox or Chrome load up instantaneously once I click the button to start them.  The speed of this machine is unlike anything I have ever seen before.  I find myself one very satisfied computer user now!!!